Bill Shorten was predicted to win the election by Burt the Psychic Crocodile.Image: Getty/7News Digital

Roy Morgan is the only polling company that has dared stick its head above the parapet, as the entire nation asks the question: How did they all get it so wrong?

Blame the 'Trump factor', the veteran pollster said on Monday.

With votes still being counted Scott Morrison appears set to form a majority Coalition Government - today securing Wentworth and heading back to work for a national security briefing.

With votes still being counted Scott Morrison appears set to form a majority Coalition Government - today securing Wentworth and heading back to work for a national security briefing.

"When a large majority believe a party will win an election, the final vote for that party is invariably much lower – as happened on Saturday," said Roy Morgan's executive chairman Gary Morgan.

"We saw the same thing at the 2016 (US) presidential election, where all the (final) polls said most people thought (Hillary) Clinton was going to win. And same with (the UK's) Brexit."

Similar to rival pollsters Newspoll (You Gov/Galaxy) and Ipsos, Roy Morgan's final face-to-face poll of 1,265 Australian voters between May 4 and 11 found in Labor's favour 52/48 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.

While signalling the possibility of the Trump factor taking effect in Roy Morgan's final analysis, the pollster nevertheless predicted a narrow Labor victory.

Voters change minds

Morgan said no one could rule out the possibility that some voters simply changed their minds in the last days of the campaign.

He suggested some potential ALP voters could have been turned off by Labor leader Bill Shorten's attempts to "channel Gough Whitlam" at a Blacktown rally two days before the election, and the subsequent death of former Labor leader Bob Hawke.

"Bob Hawke was loved by the population. When he won he had the highest approval rating of a leader ever. Shorten never had that," Morgan said.

2. Nervousness

Sheppard said the analysis coming out of all the main polling companies was "unnaturally stable".

"This suggests they're all looking at each other’s results and adjusting their raw data accordingly," she said.

"No polling company wants to be the only one that got it wrong."

Traditional wisdom holds that older people are over-represented in polls, even as mobile phone polling continues to complement and even outstrip landline polling.

The older demographic data is consequently weighted down, and the data from younger people is weighted up.

"In making those adjustments, I think we might have lost useful information," she said.

3. National instead of local data

The incorporation of mobile phone, online and robocall polling may have resulted in the loss of significant geographically-specific data in voter intention.

Part of the problem with changing technology, says Sheppard, is that the way a voter may feel about their local candidate may be entirely different from their belief on who would make the better leader of the country.

Bill Shorten concedes defeat in the 2019 federal election.Image: AAP

As many political commentators have observed during the campaign, Australian elections are becoming more presidential in nature.

Major parties are placing more emphasis on their respective leader's credentials as potential prime minister than the qualities of their endorsed candidates at the local level.

Polls using data to paint a broad national picture without the insight into specific local factors could explain some of the margin of error, because "a swing in Queensland may be very different to a swing in Victoria", Sheppard said.

4. Ennui

People aren’t as co-operative as they used to be when it come to surveys.

That's particularly if they have become weary of the scamming and spamming that plagues much of our electronic communication today.

If a number comes up on their mobile screen they don’t know, a lot of people simply do not answer the call.

And chances are that those who agree to be quizzed by a pollster on their mobile are distracted doing something else, and not placing a great deal of thought into their responses.

Chevron Right Icon'I think the media will try to rely less on (polling) in future elections.'

While polling companies are probably - and justifiably - humbled by Saturday's unexpected result, Sheppard said it was important to keep in mind that this was the first time everyone had got it so totally wrong since polling first began.

"I think the polling companies will do some soul searching, but I also think the media will try to rely less on them in future elections," she said.

What nobody seems to be able to explain is how - after successfully predicting Malcolm Turnbull before the 2016 federal election - Burt the Psychic Crocodile also got it so horribly wrong.